Birch bracket fungus at Newmillerdam this morning.
Birch Bracket
Month: February 2022
Ash Catkins
The wind had snapped off an ash twig, so I brought it home and stood it in a jug of water to watch the male and female catkins unfurl.
As I drew, I couldn’t help thinking of Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson, in their roles as Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen in one of the opening scenes of Women in Love, where school inspector Gerald interrupts Gudrun’s botany lesson on catkins.
Rhubarb Festival
We missed out on Wakefield’s Rhubarb Festival last year but they’ve been lucky enough to hit a rare spell of settled weather this weekend and the stalls on the precinct were busy.
Black Dog on the Beach
I drew my foot – in a Vivo Barefoot shoe – this morning as I waited at the hairdressers.
For my latest card, a guest artist. My niece Hannah drew a Black Dog on the Beach story with me when she was 5 or 6 years old. She’s since gone on, via a year’s work experience at DisneyWorld, Florida, to work in the travel industry, so I thought that it was time for update her original artwork for her birthday.
That’s me taking the part of the tourist.
Queen’s Drive
Black-headed gull, wood pigeon and a small flock of starlings fly over Queen’s Drive, Ossett, as we have lunch at the fish and chip restaurant.
With less than a week to go before the start of meteorological spring, I’ve just started a new A6 landscape sketchbook, having just finished an even smaller pocket sketchbook, best suited to pen only. It’s good to be working in colour again.
Redbrick Colour Swatches
Our first visit to The Redbrick Mill in Batley since before the pandemic. On a grey windswept morning it was good to see so much colour, artfully balanced by dozens of restfully grey sofas.
Beachcomber
The latest round of homemade birthday cards include this Scottish beachcomber . . .
. . . and this Santa and his dog cartoon. Yes, it is a birthday card but it’s based on my great nephew Ted’s design for a card for the University of Hull, which featured his fantasy pet dog, Fudge, delivering presents with Rudolph. I’ve got competition.
And finally, for my brother Bill’s card, I dug out this Kodachrome of Bill, Dad and I with Vache the springer spaniel from a day out at the small lake where my dad used to go fishing at Terrington near Castle Howard in what is now North Yorkshire.
I’m the good looking one.
The View from Shelley
We’ve had three named storms in the last seven days and we decided that Newmillerdam would be too windswept and waterlogged for our Monday morning walk.
So instead we headed for Dobbies Garden Centre, Shelley, where we could enjoy the view across the valley of Shepley Dike through the panoramic windows of the cafe.
February Flowers
Some of the flowers already showing in the garden this weekend. As Storm Eunice has just gone through and Storm Franklin is about to arrive, these were from photographs taken yesterday morning.
With the periwinkle and hellebore, I found that I started in the top left of the drawing intending to keep things fairly small but as I added detail the scale changed so when I started on the lungwort I sketched the outlines roughly in pencil, allowing enough space to add detail.
I think this speeded up the whole process because I was just able to get on with the pen, knowing that I wouldn’t have to start fiddling to fit it all in.
I didn’t pencil in the crocus and the snowdrop. They consist mainly of isolated verticals, so they can be drawn individually. The branching pattern of the first three plants that I’d drawn meant that the relationship of one part to another needed a bit more care. I look for negative shapes between the leaves and when starting a new flower or leaf I look for the angle to points on the plant that I’ve already drawn.
Tennis Ball Fox Cache
Even without the trail cam, I can tell that the foxes are back. I found these two tennis balls cached at the edge of my wild flower bed down by the compost bins this morning.